Allowing the Unknown
I made a video on Instagram last week about the difference between patience and waiting: While they may seem synonymous, waiting comes with expectation. You are biding your time for something you’ve already determined you want, or deserve. The outcome feels assured and certain, so long as you can wait a little longer. Patience, on the other end, is being open to the unknown, to let the future unfold. It’s very difficult. Too often, in our rush for certainty and reassurance, we cut off possibility. We limit the unlimited, according to one of my favorite healers, Anne Emerson. (If you are looking for someone to plumb your subconscious limiting beliefs, she’s the ticket.)
In that same vein, I recently interviewed Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. We spoke about a small moment in his book where he talks about the word decide, writing in a parenthetical: (The original Latin word for “decide,” decidere, means “to cut off,” as in slicing away alternatives; it’s a close cousin of words like “homicide” and “suicide.”) Deciding is a big deal, often monumental. We champion decision-making in our society—we like people who are active and engaged in life. Making decisions is theoretically how we propel ourselves forward. But it is a process of elimination, and we don’t spend as much time contemplating what is lost when we pick a path and move. We cut off potential. Roads not taken. I understand why we don’t contemplate this much because it’s paralyzing. Theoretically.
As always, there’s a balance between momentum and doing and also patience and being. I find myself in an unusual place—an opportunity to be still, to stay open to the unknown, to not really decide anything at all—after a lifetime of moving forward at a sometimes relentless pace. All this doing hasn’t always been by conscious choice—typically I’ve always had obligations and deadlines as cattle prods behind me, moving me through my career, or from project to project. But suddenly, I have a clear plate. My book is moving into production imminently. A ghostwriting gig is miraculously wrapped. Projects have either coalesced into tidy endings or dissolved into dust. I have things steadily marching forward—my podcast for one—but for the most part…I am finding myself free. Open. Not accounted for. And I’m not sure what I want to do next: Throw myself into another book proposal, take on additional consulting gigs, or just…wait. Or more precisely, to choose patience, and allow the not knowing to unfold. “I don’t know” is an invitation to the divine to show me what’s possible. I’ve always rushed to fill time with income-generating activities—all my time, really—and so resisting that urge is another big lesson for me that brings with it scarcity and fear. But I know I must push through. And step into the void. Voids—places of stillness, silence, darkness—are an opportunity for creativity. Absent the womb, there is no new life.
I recently inhaled The Wisdom of Not Knowing by Estelle Frankel, a stunning exploration of many of these themes couched in wisdom traditions and Judaism. I have a lot to say about this book—more to come!—but these words from Frankel ring true: “Now, as an adult, I see how this instinctual fear of the dark manifests as foreboding anxiety about the unknown future—that which I cannot see. We humans simply do not like ‘being in the dark’ about things. We prefer to ‘know’ and to understand things rather than wait for life to unfold and slowly reveal itself to us. The very expression—being in the dark—links our aversion to darkness with our uneasy feelings about the unknown.”
Here’s to allowing the darkness.